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Applying small updates is normally no problem in a running system. But what about if there is a new major release of your favorite Desktop? Or a major version update of your used Linux distribution? Today’s concepts are most of the time to apply the patches in the running system and risk that a running service or Desktop breaks, or apply them all during boot and wait for quite some time until you can access your machine again. A solution for this are transactional updates.

Transactional updates are atomic, means either they applied successful, or if an error occurred, you have the same state as before. And if an update does not work, there is an easy way to go back to the last working state. The update is done in the background without influencing the system.

There are different solutions for this, I want to leverage btrfs for this and use standard tools and package managers.

Thorsten Kukuk has a master degree in computer science and started with Linux in 1992. Since 1999 he is working for SUSE. Formerly as release manager, now as Senior Architect SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. He was, among others, involved in the following open source projects: glibc... Read More →